It is strongly desirable in automobile industry to improve passenger safety. Two approaches are applied for the improvement, the use of stronger materials and the optimization of structure of body members. High strength steel hollow sections are used for body structure of the automobiles for this purpose. The structures of hollow sections are optimized to increase crashworthiness of vehicles for human safety. In the crash situation, a kinetic energy is absorbed by the hollow section. Hollow sections typically joined by resistance spot welding have insufficient energy absorption because join are not continuous. Although laser welding is a better approach to overcome this problem, high heating temperatures reduce the quality, accuracy and reliability of joined parts. In this paper, the crashing behavior of high strength steel hollow sections joined by hemming was examined by an experiment by crushing the hollow section at a high speed stroke in a press machine.
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